Thank you very much, and good morning everyone, and thanks for joining us on our investor presentation this morning. .We've just released our results, as you will have seen, this morning on the ASX, and I think we're quite pleased with the way that the year's actually panned out. There were a few bumps in the road as the year progressed, particularly around business in the United States, which we were concerned would diminish, and some other fundamentals as well that had little hiccups as they went along. Fortunately, we were able to iron most of those out and, I think, come up with what is a very good result for the full financial year. You've no doubt seen the numbers, but in case you haven't, let me just very, very quickly take you through some of the fundamentals. Total transaction value: $3.8 billion
That was down 8.6% on the previous year. As we've set out in our various presentations and in the annual report itself, three main factors contributed to that. The first was a decline in the total value of premium fares in particular, but airfares generally fell throughout FY 2025, and that caused a decline in our TTV. The second thing that happened was that we saw quite a switch at various points in the year away from long-haul destinations, particularly East Coast, U.S., UK, and Europe. We saw a switch away from those destinations to shorter-haul, non-stop, one-flight destinations such as Bali, Japan, Thailand, etc., etc., and that sent our average airfare sale down. Land sales tended to remain relatively consistent in terms of their volumes throughout that period, but the total value of our air sales declined.
The other reason was we lost a few agents throughout FY 2025, and agents come and go, as we know, but we're still holding over 2,600. We've had a very good renewal both here in Australia and New Zealand of some of our major franchise groups that we're very pleased to have finished. I think we had 98% of our first travel group agents in New Zealand renewed, and 96% of members of the branded and associate network renewed in FY 2025. Those renewals are, of course, very important. They tend to renew between three and five years, so we tend to go through this process once every two or three years, given the number of networks that we have. We had a very, very strong renewal rate amongst our brand and associate networks, as I said, here in Australia, and amongst the first travel group agents in New Zealand.
First travel group agents, that business and that brand came with the ETG acquisition a couple of years ago, which was quite good. If I take you through our total revenue quickly, $192 million. TTV fell 8.6%. Total revenue fell 8.7%. The good thing in all of that, if there can be a good thing in all of that, the good thing was that our operating costs fell 8.6% as well. We were able to reduce those proportionately to the fall in both TTV and revenues, the result of that being that we ended up with an underlying EBITDA of $60.6 million, down 8.6% on the previous year, which is exactly what our TTV fell by. Our EBITDA from continuing operations actually increased by 0.6%, and our profit before income tax from continuing operations went up by just under 8%, 7.8%.
That was a good outcome, resulting largely from very careful cost management, and we're very pleased, I think, with that result. We paid a decent amount of tax, of course, both on the previous year and we'll pay a decent amount on this year, which has been useful in as much as it's allowed us to continue to pay a fully franked dividend. We have always paid fully franked dividends, and we're going to continue to do that. We've declared a $0.06 per share final dividend on top of our $0.08 per share interim dividend, bringing our total dividend for the year to $0.14 per share on a fully franked basis. We're very happy to be able to return to shareholders a strong return, a very strong return on their investment in the business.
I've put a number of things in our investor presentation on page five, and you can see there some of the things I just wanted to highlight that we've spent $95 million on technologies in the last eight years. Now, often I ask myself the question, "Are we a travel business utilizing technology, or are we a technology business selling travel?" I think, obviously, it's a mixture of both, but we've invested enormously in our technologies over the last eight years, and that includes through the COVID period when we decreased our spend, but we continued to maintain quite a very, I think, appropriate level of spend during that period on the basis, of course, that we were going to come out the other side of it at some point. Those technologies continue to drive a lot of our business and deliver a lot of efficiency into it.
We make the point there that structural tailwinds favoring the leisure travel segment, they certainly are. The leisure travel segment, and I've expressed this to you on many different occasions, but the leisure travel segment is incredibly resilient. What we're seeing even now in the first couple of months of this financial year is that, in fact, our business is on the up, and we're seeing strong growth for most of our major carriers and strong growth for most of our major destinations. I know I've seen a number of travel businesses, not only here in Australia but in other parts of the world, call out that they expect FY 2026 to be better than FY 2025. That certainly would be our impression as well. FY 2024 was a cracking year, obviously, recovering from COVID.
Those who couldn't get away in FY 2023 because of the sudden boom in travel and the partial lack of availability of seats and other pieces of infrastructure, they all tended to back up into FY 2024, and they couldn't get out of the place fast enough. Here now in FY 2025, we saw that sort of taper off a little bit, and we talked about, I talked about a moment ago, the fact that, in fact, many people chose to travel relatively short haul, and they went to destinations within a six to eight-hour, maybe even a 10-hour duration on one flight. What we're seeing at the moment is strong growth back to UK, to Europe, and to North America, particularly the East Coast.
We're very enthused by the results thus far, and I think we're going to see FY 2026 is going to be a better year than FY 2024, FY 2025, I should say. That's, I think, something to be really should note. On page six, we call out some of the key metrics there. Profit after tax up 4.1. I won't read them out to you; they're all sitting there in eight boxes if you don't have it. It's on page six of the investor presentation that we watched at the ASX this morning. EPS, I'm happy to say it's gone up 3% as well to $0.204 per share. We put all the good arrows on the top line there. All the arrows pointing down are on the bottom line. I think our underlying EBITDA margin came in at 31.4%.
Whilst it's down on the previous year at 31.9%, it exceeded our target of 30%. For many years, as you will recall, I called out a target for an underlying EBITDA margin of 25%. During COVID and during a lot of cost-cutting that we undertook, we realized if we could maintain some of that cost-cutting in the business, that we'd actually really get a much better outcome in relation to that underlying EBITDA margin. We have been able to achieve that. We held it at 31.4% for the year just finished. As I said, down a little bit from 31.9% the previous year, but we regard that as a very strong result within our particular type of business. On page seven, I talk about some of the key business highlights and retail.
The stability and strength of our network is absolutely critical to us, and I talked about the renewal rate. We're looking at all of the technology impacts that various things are having, not the least of which, of course, is AI. We are looking to utilize that, implement that into various applications that we have. We also have a long-term belief and faith in the value of the trusted advisor, the travel agent. For us, we regard them as the essential ingredient for a lot of people in having a wonderful leisure break. Now, of course, we were heavily into the corporate business in the past. We're no longer in that. Some of our agents have got a reasonable-sized corporate business.
Agents, whether it's corporate, whether it's leisure, whether it's BFR, agents, I think, continue to play and will continue to play a fundamental role as the trusted advisors to travelers. We don't see any indications of that changing anytime soon. You'll see there wholesale and inbound. Our wholesale and inbound businesses are going particularly well. Cinzia, who is our Chief Operating Officer, runs the wholesale and inbound businesses, and I'll pass to her in a moment. We're very happy with the way that our ReadyRooms business is going. It's up 110% on the prior corresponding period, being last year. Our USA land volumes, whilst they started to trend down, they ended up being double of the previous year on a year-on-year basis. That was extremely pleasing. We undertook a lot of campaigns. We worked closely with Tourism California or California Tourism.
We worked closely with a number of other partners in both the U.S. and Canada, and we were able to actually turn it around and drive a lot more volumes through the U.S. and Canada. Our wholesale cruise sales through our Creative Cruising and CruiseCo businesses increased by 27%, which was also very positive. I think that we're continuing to see, despite some of the cruise ships pulling out of Australia, I'm sure you've read about that or seen that. Despite some of the cruise ships pulling out of Australia, our volume on the cruises, most of which are offshore, of course, is up 27%. I make a brief note there in the presentation about Barlow Travel Group. We purchased that a little bit earlier in the year. That is a great business based in Wellington, New Zealand.
It really adds to our New Zealand capacity and our expertise in New Zealand across a range of different things. That's been very well implemented. It's really been one of the easiest implementations we've had. Peter Barlow, who owned the business, continues to run the business together with his partner in that business, Ross Jamison, and that is going from strength to strength as they take advantage of the things that Helloworld can deliver for them, but also trade off their outstanding reputation in New Zealand. We're very, very happy about that. I've got here on page eight some notes and points about the outlook. As I said before, we see FY 2026 actually shaping up better than FY 2025.
When we look at the forwards that we held at this time last year for the remainder of FY 2025, we compare them to the forwards that we hold at the present point in time for FY 2026. They are looking very strong. I make the point in dot point number two there that our air bookings for departure in FY 2026 are currently up 11% on the prior corresponding period. They're 11% higher than what they were at this time last year. That is a big number to start with, and adding another 11% to it is pretty positive. We will release guidance as well. I think that we've got the last point there. We anticipate providing guidance. We're going to try and do that before the Helloworld Travel annual general meeting. That's not the day before, but we anticipate we can probably come out with guidance.
We just need to finish off July, August, and see how September is shaping up. We anticipate that we'll be able to get guidance out to the market sometime late September or early October before our AGM has occurred. I'm going to pass over to Cinzia now. Cinzia looks after many things, but the wholesale and inbound businesses, which have been going very well, and is the Chief Operating Officer. Over to you.
Excuse me. Thank you. Yes, our wholesale brands, Viva Holidays in Australia and Go Holidays in New Zealand, have gone particularly well. I think we can put that down to the increasing number of destinations that we are selling and also quite against the trend. We are still producing brochures, a significant number of brochures that the travel agents like to have on their shelves. They are obviously shops that need merchandise on the shelves, and our brochures are what they need, and their demographic really demands them. We are increasing our array of destinations, including launching Japan. We've just launched Indochina. Vietnam has been classified as the number one destination in growth out of Australia from a recent report on one of the travel trade magazines. We have, about three months ago, released our Indochina comprehensive brochure valid until 2027.
At the same time, our wholesale cruise business, where we had a small decline in the retail cruise, which is when the agents book the cruise lines, the cruise directly with the cruise lines, booking to our wholesale division means a higher margin for the business. That is what we have been encouraging, to switch from direct bookings with the cruise lines onto our wholesale packages. Lastly, ReadyRooms, which is basically an online accommodation booking B2B for the agents, has had a lot of improvements in terms of user improvements and has really driven a lot of the move from the travel agents using alternative sites like Expedia, etc., onto this platform that they regard as obviously Helloworld on. We see this in the beginning of this financial year, this trend continuing for both wholesale and ReadyRooms at the same time.
We certainly see this land and cruise sales in the wholesale division continuing to be extremely strong for 2026, with an increase on the books for future travel already well in the double figures. Thank you.
Thank you for that. I'm going to skip now to page 15, cash flow, and get Mike to take you through that and explain how we managed to spend $99 million of our cash, where $99 million of our cash went throughout the year. You'll be pleased to know we know exactly what happened, we know exactly where it went, and exactly what we've done with it. Mike, over to you.
Yeah, thanks, Andrew. I think the first point I'd just like to cover is the drop in the net operating cash flows from continuing operations in the year. We used $12.5 million of cash, and that was driven primarily by two things. The first was in 2025, we had an additional BSP payment run. In 2025, there were 53 payment runs, whereas there were only 52 settlements with agents. That equated to about a $40 million outflow of additional funds in 2025. Obviously, that's just a timing difference. The second main reason for the usage of operating cash in 2025 is around higher tax payments. You'll be able to see from the numbers that in 2024, our company tax payments were quite low. That's because we were coming off the back of a 2023 year, which was a tax loss year.
Hence, in 2024, we weren't required to make company tax installments, whereas in 2025, we effectively had to pay the majority of the 2024 tax and start paying 2025 installments. Obviously, as we head into 2026, that will normalize. Those two things, along with just sort of normal timing differences of cash collections and payments, drove the lower operating cash flow for the year. In terms of our investing cash flows, we used just under $55 million in cash, and that was driven by a few things. Firstly, the acquisition of the Webjet shares, which equated the purchase price was $48.5 million. There was a payment for the purchase of the Barlow Travel Group, which was $10.7 million. We invested a further $13.7 million in interim deposits. Offsetting that was proceeds from the sale of CTM shares that we made during the year, which generated cash of $18.4 million.
That explains the $54.9 million of investing cash that we used. Finally, from our financing cash flows, as you can see there, the primary reason for the cash usage at the financing line was dividends paid for $22.5 million. The other thing you can see there is the cash used within the discontinued operations was for $4 million. That kind of explains the movement in our cash and the usage of just under $99 million of cash in the year.
I think it's worth mentioning that $4 million in terms of the non-continuing assets, that's entertainment logistics. We're actually bringing a little bit of profit back there. We've now sold that business. The operations have been sold. The lease has been taken over that we have up in Sydney, and we've sold all of the prime movers as well. It'll actually be a bit of money to come back in this year for that now that we've realized that disposal. I think many people will probably be relatively happy to hear that we are no longer in the transport business, except in Fiji, where we have tourist vehicles over there. We're no longer in the transport business, and we've moved on from that. That is, I think, certainly worth noting. I won't take you through the balance sheet.
You all send millions of those, so I don't need to run you through anything there. There's nothing particular that I feel we should highlight. If you have any questions, of course, don't hesitate to throw them in when we're finished. We're going through here some of the retail highlights. If you look onto page 18 of our investor presentation, some of the retail highlights. I think that what I could just say in the broad is that our brand strength around the Helloworld brand is very good. We're now starting to see some real traction from either existing franchisees, some of whom are multi-store owners, some of whom are single-store owners. We're seeing a lot of traction from existing store owners to open a second, third, fifth store, whatever it might be. We're also seeing quite a bit of interest in people taking up new stores.
I think right at the moment, we have about 16 new Helloworld stores slated to open this financial year. I think we'll start to see a number of other people who've got independent their own branding, whether that's a geographic branding or their names on the business. We'll start to see quite a bit of people moving back towards the Helloworld brand. Some of them moved away initially. When I say initially, some of them moved away post-COVID and thought, "I won't have to pay franchise fees. I'll just call it Burnes Travel. That'll be fine." "I'll join My Travel Group network or some other network, one of the other networks that we have." They're now starting to realize that, in fact, the Helloworld brand is extremely strong, is extremely powerful out there in the marketplace, and they want to take advantage of that. It also helps add value.
This is one of the most really fundamental points for retailers. It adds value to their business. It's much easier to sell and get a better multiple on a business that's got a brand that is well known in the marketplace than it is to sell a totally independent brand that might be known around Bunbury, but that's about as far as anyone knows about it. We're seeing people are getting much better multiples if they are selling their businesses if they're carrying a full Helloworld branded kit in their outlets. I'm not going to take you through the highlights of retail and the wholesale. They're all just the nice things of awards and recognitions and so on and so forth. Our conferences, our Owner-Manager's Conference, which took place in Vancouver earlier this year, is very well attended, as was our ETGX conference in Adelaide about six weeks ago.
We've got our Frontliners Conference coming up in November, where we expect to have somewhere between 400 and 500 agents coming up to Cairns for that. They're still very well supported by both the agents and also by our supplier partners. Cruise highlights for FY 2025, set them out on page 22, up 27%. That, I think, is a very significant number. That's 27%, not in bookings, it's 27% in TTV. Our cruise business is going quite well. Inbound didn't grow much, it grew by 4% though, and that was better than nothing in what was a challenging year. We think that with some of the uncertainties out there, and constantly we're working in a world of uncertainties, the uncertainties out there, people are going to want to use their agents offshore, just as we expect them here to use their agents to go offshore.
Our wholesale clients up in the UK, Europe, North America, etc., are holding their own in the market. Let me say that. We're working with all of them to try and help grow their businesses. ReadyRooms was a real star performer in FY 2025. We bought that back in late 2019 in an effort of great timing. No, not really, because it was basically shut down by February of the following year. We continue to invest in the technology. The team that runs that is in Greece. It's out of the old Excite Travel business that we purchased back in 2019. We now have over 300,000 hotels, etc., on the portal. Agents are using it more and more. We're very pleased with the way that's going. If you want to comment about that at all, Cinzia?
No, just to say that it continues to go from strength to strength, and it's taken away some of our agents that were using competitor sites onto our sites. Once they start using it, they really don't leave it. It's very good, it's a proprietary system. I think it's worth noting, and we have full control of it.
Thank you. My Way Travel & Events , that's been run by Simon Lethlean. Simon Lethlean, former Senior Manager at the AFL, and subsequently took over and ran the St Kilda Football Club for a number of years. He runs this business. He works in partnership with Roger Field, who previously was the President of Asia Pacific for Live Nation, ran Ticketek and Live Nation. This business is going now from strength to strength. It's taken a while to get it moving, as all new startups do. We're now getting access to a wide variety of tickets. We package them up with a wide variety of accommodation and other events whilst the customers are there. We are currently in the process of selling our grand final ticket allocation from the AFL. We have ticket allocations for all of the major events happening over the summer here in Australia.
We anticipate this business going from strength to strength. Simon and his team, which he now builds up, are doing a fantastic job. We'll shortly be releasing a portal, which will have fully bookable content, air, land, and tickets on it. That will be quite a unique proposition. That should be finished by the end of November. That's going to really, I think, kick this business along in a big hurry. Air tickets, we issue millions of air tickets, and that's going well. We didn't issue as many last year. Last year is the year before, I should say. That's consequently pulled the TTV down a bit. The value of the tickets that we've issued came down a bit as well, pulled the TTV down. This technology that we're utilizing, it's very, very strong market-leading technology.
As you can see there in the last dot point on page 26, strong recovery with air bookings for departures in FY 2026 already so far up 11%. That's 11% off a big number. Some highlights in New Zealand. Can I just say that our New Zealand business continues to perform extremely well? We have a great team in New Zealand led by Chris Hunter. The rest of the team in New Zealand are doing a brilliant job. They've integrated the Barlow Travel Group business into the Helloworld family over there. New Zealand continues to perform. The economy in New Zealand, like a lot of economies at the moment, including our own, leaves something to be desired. Despite that, they are still performing very well in the leisure travel space, which we occupy in New Zealand.
I'm very happy with the way the team is working over there and what else has been happening. There are marketing highlights we put in on page 28. I'm not going to run through those, but you can see some of the activities that we've undertaken in all sorts of places. Technology, if we go to page 31, I talk about ResWorld, TripApps, DataCheck, Genesys. I'd just say I'd love to come out with an announcement because I'm sure our share price would quadruple if we were going to use AI to deliver a blockchain-driven, blockchain-settled itineraries and what have you, and you could pay by crypto. We don't accept crypto for payment at the moment, so sorry about that. We don't use blockchain at the minute.
We are looking long and hard at AI and what we can and can't do with that, what is practical for us to do. At the moment, the biggest advantages that we see out there are with our own internal business and our own internal actions in terms of the $2.4 billion of transactions that Helloworld does in and of itself as a wholesaler, as an air ticket seller, etc., etc., and then expanding that out to help our agents to make their operations even more efficient. That's going to be our primary focus over the next 12 months- 18 months whilst we look at what the itinerary outcomes are, suggestions for flight combinations, particularly around the world tickets. We do see a lot of possibilities in AI for around the world tickets.
They are very complicated to calculate, but can generate some great outcomes if you know how to do it. We think that AI can deliver us a really strong solution in that area. Obviously, we're not light-eyed; we haven't got our head stuck in a bucket of sand, but we're going step by step, doing it very methodically to work out exactly where we can maximize our utilization of that technology. We're just coming up to 35 minutes, and I'm going to pause shortly. We talk about our own technologies in some of the next couple of pages. Automation is something that we have been on about for as long as we've been in this business. If we can automate something, we will automate it. However, we're very, very careful not to misinterpret and misrepresent automation as utilization of AI.
There is a strong distinction. There are also some pretty blurred lines as well, I might admit. Automation is something that we have implemented right across our businesses over the last 15 years and the 10 years, certainly, that we've been running Helloworld. We'll continue to do that with the help of AI wherever it might be appropriate . If we go to page 36, our retail networks, over 2,600 agents and brokers in our retail networks, employ in total just over 10,000 consultants. There are 10,000 people out there today selling the products and services that we provide them through our air tickets business, through our wholesale businesses, and through our preferred partner relationships across over 120 preferred partners here in Australia and New Zealand. That is a great sales force. They're extremely professional.
For those of you who've dealt with them, and I know that many of you have, they provide a wonderful level of service and comfort to people who are looking to put together, whether it's the simplest seven-night Bali trip or it's the most complex six-week European sojourn. They are very, very good at it, and they will have your back every step of the way. We don't see the demand for those services going down anytime soon, I can tell you. Which leads me to look at the enduring value of the trusted advisor, which I've mentioned many times before. We continue to see in our own research and surveys, in talking to our retail networks across the country in both Australia and New Zealand, we continue to see that the demand for those services is holding up.
We have no reason to believe that it will do anything but continue to hold up well into the future. That's enough of having to listen to my adulted tones this morning. I am going to now pass back to our, well, not moderator, but we'll call them a moderator and open the floor up to questions. Thank you.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Kazimier Czerwejo from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Hi, team. Thanks for taking my question. Do you hear me okay?
Yes, loud and clear, Kazimier.
Thanks. You mentioned TTV was down driven by macro or lower travel numbers versus shift to medium haul destinations. It seems like 4Q was down 10% and didn't really improve from third quarter. How many of these setbacks do you expect to be new norm and/or some structural, sorry, cyclical change? Any outlook you can provide for TTVs going forward? Thanks.
I think I have already provided some numbers around that, particularly in our air ticketing business. I mean, we've got growth in wholesale, growth in inbound, a little bit of growth in inbound, but growth in wholesale, significant growth is in ReadyRooms, that part of the wholesale business. I think the thing I'd point out and what's important is the growth in our air ticketing business and our air ticketing TTVs, which are up 11.6% at this point, year to date. We look at our numbers for travel across the next 10 months to the 30th of June 2026, and what we're seeing is that they are, in fact, up on the previous year. At this point, and I underline that, at this point, it looks like FY 2026 will be a better year than FY 2025 in terms of TTV. It should land some percentage points.
We'll get some percentage point growth on FY 2024. Whether we catch up to FY 2024 or surpass FY 2024, it's too early to tell. We're certainly doing better than we were at this time last year.
Okay, thank you. On revenue margin, it was flat this year. Can you please break down some key drivers of the flat outcome and outlook for margin going forward as well?
It was up a little bit, but I think it was very good to maintain it. I mean, everyone was talking earlier in the year, and I read a lot of reports written by various organizations, none of which I'll name right now because you're all on the phone. I remember reading various reports that our margin would decline in FY 2025, and it hasn't. I think we did a pretty reasonable job of actually maintaining our margin in FY 2025. I'm not going to predict where it's going to go in FY 2026, but I will say that we've always got to focus on trying to improve margin. Margin is driven tremendously by mix, mix across land, air, cruise, etc. It's also driven by mix across airlines and cruise companies, etc., depending upon the commercial arrangements we have in place with them.
I certainly don't believe margin will decline at all in FY 2025, FY 2026, I should say. We might see a slight improvement. In fact, we would expect to see a slight improvement at least in FY 2026. I say that because our commercial outcomes with the major carriers that we sell are better in FY 2026 than they are in FY 2025.
Okay, thanks for that. All the best.
Pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. Your next question comes from Philip Pepe from Shaw and Partners. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Yeah, thanks for taking the question. Just a question on the most recent sort of school holiday periods. How did the winter months compare to this time last year? Did you see an uptick in people booking their school holiday trips? I know you said forward orders are up 11%, but how does the school holiday period compare to last year?
I think that one of the critical things that most people would understand about school holidays is that nobody books them in the school holidays. I mean, if you're not going to get anywhere.
Sorry, we're just discussing the dates here. Thank you.
The thing about school holidays is that people book them months and months in advance. We're taking bookings right now for school holidays at the end of the first term in 2026 and the second term as well. As you know, you can book an airfare for 360 days out. People who don't want to pay an absolute fortune will get in and go early. We also put a lot of early bird specials out into the marketplace, particularly for international travel. We put a lot of early bird specials out there as well. Typically, what happens with school holidays, if they're looking a bit softer than they otherwise might from a domestic perspective, the airlines will put some pretty sharp specials in the marketplace in the lead-up to the school holidays. I'd suggest that most of our school holiday bookings for the remainder of FY 2025 are booked and deposited.
Obviously, they'll go through the payment process as it gets closer to the actual travel date. Because of the nature of our business and the sheer volume of it, we do see little tick-ups and little tick-downs in terms of the actual number of travelers, but it doesn't really move the bar too much. It's more the seasonality. We have an enormous number of people traveling without kids who are going away with friends, with family, with whatever, and they are going in the high season, June through to the end of September, and they're going up to the northern hemisphere. It's more the seasonality and ultimately out of that, the weather that drives our booking patterns as opposed to school holidays, which don't have too much of an effect.
That makes sense. Thank you for the detail. In terms of the travel patterns, are we starting? Are we not starting yet? Is it a continuation of shorter duration trips? Obviously, there's a bunch of footy planes heading to Bali next week. In terms of other people, are we starting to see going back to the U.S., back to Europe, or is it still one flight, shorter destinations, safer destinations, better value for the multi-dollar?
We're seeing at the moment, which is contrary to last year, what we're seeing at the moment is people are going back to those longer-haul destinations, particularly UK and Europe. Now, you know, one of the things that what's exactly driving that? Firstly, people who booked later in FY 2025 paid more to go, and the fares were quite high. The early bird does really catch the worm, which is obviously why we call them early bird specials. The early birds get the deals. We're seeing at the moment, as I said, 11.6% growth in our air bookings across the first seven weeks of the current financial year. I think that that will hold.
From talking to our agents, and our agents are obviously our greatest barometer of how's the market feeling and what's the market talking about, talking to our agents, it seems like there's a lot of demand out there at the moment for people who want to go long haul. Of course, the situation in Ukraine doesn't help much. The situation in the Middle East doesn't help much. A lot of people, I think, put off going, or they put off booking until the last minute when they knew it was safe, took off traveling, or they even didn't go. A lot of people put it off as a result of that. Unfortunately, those conflicts are still raging, but they're not spilling over their borders. I think people have a lot more confidence to go this year than they did last year.
Excellent. No, thank you. Appreciate the call.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. We'll now pause a moment to allow for any final questions to register. Your next question comes from Belinda Moore from Morgan's. Please go ahead. Pardon me, Belinda, you may be on mute.
Hi, Andrew and team. Look, Andrew, I think you've got some options over future acquisitions like MTA, etc. Could you talk about maybe what your intentions are there? Also, what sort of sum of funds are you expecting from the winding down of the entertainment freight logistics business, please?
Firstly, I'll just quickly get rid of that ALX question. A couple of million dollars. It's not huge, but it's between the surplus value that we made a bit of money selling the trucks, and we sold the business for a not totally unreasonable amount. Yeah, a couple of million bucks. We're not going to retire on it, but it's still every bit useful. MTA, let me just say, we have an option to purchase MTA, and we have till the end of this month to exercise that option. We are intending to exercise that option. We've been working with MTA very closely over the last six months on a transition of management in that business. We will look to acquire the balance of that business sometime over the next couple of months, and that will become a 100% owned subsidiary of HLO .
There's a couple of other businesses. There's one in New Zealand we've got an option over that's not until next year. We're looking at another very good, high-quality retail outlet that we think could be, you know, we'll take a stake in it, not buy it outright. The other thing, Belinda since you've asked a question about acquisitions. We obviously hold a somewhat large position in Webjet . We have just under 17% of Webjet at the moment. We're contemplating what our options are in that regard. Webjet has an annual general meeting this Thursday at 2:30 P.M. It's a little late if any of you are looking for something to do on Thursday afternoon. They've got an annual general meeting down there to talk about their results. You will have seen that they recently announced that they were going to acquire Locomote.
I would describe that acquisition as courageous, particularly the pricing of it. They are also planning a share buyback. We think it's a good business. We think it's a very good business. We like it. We think it's got certain parts that we can help contribute towards. We've got certain things that we can offer them as a business. Whether we do that as a very solid investor in that business or in some other format, we're still working through our options on that. We believe it's a very good and well-established brand in the B2C online space here in Australia. It'll continue to be a very good business into the future.
Andrew, could I just ask, what do you think you'll need to pay for MTA just so we can put that through our cash flow forecast?
We're looking at about seven times EBITDA, which is what we also paid for the first 50% back in 2016. We're looking at seven times EBITDA. Right at the moment, their EBITDA is looking at being around $10 million. When we first bought it, it had an EBITDA of $4 million, and we paid $14 million for 50%. We're going to acquire the second 50% for roughly $35 million.
Thank you very much.
We won't be paying all cash.
Thank you.
It'll be a mixture of script and cash.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Burnes for closing remarks.
Listen, thanks everyone for joining us. I know it's a busy time, so really appreciate your time this morning, and all the best throughout the reporting season. Bye-bye.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.